It used to not be as important that game console software is free, because
they were not general-purpose computers designed to interpret as wide a range
of code as possible. However, this is becoming less true with each new
generation of consoles, as modern consoles (like cell-phones) are designed
with the same specifications as computers and are expected to do many of the
things that computers traditionally do, like browse the internet and play
movies. We need to find some inroads into the console industry, or it's going
to continue to be a worse place for freedom at the rate it's going.
In the GNU/Linux using world, you have the Free Software activist one one
side who is a techie and rarely or never plays video games, because he's
mostly concerned with everyday code and replicating whatever practical
functionality is still missing from fully-free systems (see the FSF's list of
high-priority projects for a flavor of what I am talking about). On the other
side, you have the devil-may-care Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora user who dual-boots into
Windows to do all his gaming. He uses GNU/Linux presumably only because he
likes it, maybe even just because (for the time being) it can be used as a
means to brag to his friends about how much he knows about computers. "Cop my
1337 Windows 7/Ubuntu 9.10/Kubuntu 9.10 triple-boot, guyz!" We need to
convince the Free Software people to care about videogames and regard a
fully-free as an EXTREMELY vital high-priority project that makes or breaks
our adoption. We need to convince the gamer that he can use WINE to run all
his games and lose very little in the translation, and in the process ditch
Windows altogether if he even cares one mite about the community that gave
him his nice operating system in the first place. We need to let the kernel
people know that is a tremendous betrayal of the values we rely on them to
uphold if they accept DRM-laden modules like the one Noveau uses into the
kernel. We have a lot of work to do.
Trisquel Gamer will continue to be a vital touchstone for the intersection
between truly free software and videogames. It features several 3D games of
high quality, but the problem is only the Intel cards will run them, and less
than optimally at that.
